Other people’s presentation slides used to drive me crazy. “You’ve got Arial and Times New Roman and fifteen lines of text in 14-point font! Those colours are hideous! Stop with the serif fonts already! Are you going to read aloud every point?”

Then I gave up caffeine.

No, really — about two years ago, a casual conversation with my colleague Andy about minimalist slide design in teaching suddenly sat up and grew legs. We went from idle discussion to brainstorming ideas to me going home over Christmas wondering if I would get my brain to slow down to less than 1,000rpm. We managed to secure funding from the Centre for Research-Informed Teaching, and for the last 18 months, we’ve been exploring the effects of using minimalist slide presentations on people’s memory for information. I blog about it, think about it, and chase down ideas that might relate to it. I have even — *shudder* — acquired new skills to pursue it.

In short, I have well and truly geeked out over my research. And it feels great.

I posted last(ish) time about how education can learn from the technology sector by growing its own storytellers and role models, but I think there’s plenty more to take away from the home of geek, starting with trying to become one.

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you in school: your inner geek is the most powerful learning resource you will ever have. It’s the thing keeping you at your computer or from putting down your book until well past bedtime; the thing needling you with “Hey, that’s interesting …” It holds your attention when you’re unfocused; delights or enrages you in the face of apathy or exhaustion. Your inner geek won’t rest until it consumes you in the fire of your own attention.

Harness this awesome power, and you can do nearly anything you want: a geek illuminated from within by the source of their own geeky pleasure is one of the brightest lights in the universe.

Geek, should you need to know how to get there, is basically a place where your interests and your strengths meet:

Getting in touch with your inner geek is the fast track to achievement. Over the last two years, I’ve worked harder than I ever worked in my life — yes, even during my Ph.D. — and I’ve loved every minute. Hard work isn’t all that hard if it’s doing something you love. I also got to take our work to conferences in San Francisco and Corfu; being a geek comes with some pretty cool perks. (Okay, so I also got to go to Milton Keynes. This was a useful exercise in humility.)

Geeking out provides students with good role models, giving them permission to indulge their own intellect and curiosity. Show me a good educator, and I’ll show you someone whose teaching involves some variation on “Hey, look at this — isn’t that cool?” Students need to see that geeking out can lead to rewarding careers. Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters have become poster-boys for scientific curiosity, but they also get invited to the Emmys. I want to give them both a big hug for making being a geek cool; the cooler being curious and knowledgeable becomes, the easier it will be for students everywhere to own their inner geek and move forward in the world.

Education can help shape a culture in which geeking out is not just socially acceptable, but actually desirable. One of the big lies often peddled about geeks is that we’re happiest alone. I don’t think that’s true: the internet in its current form basically exists because geeks liked talking to other geeks. (Or at least reading about them from a safe distance.) When geeks hook up and reinforce their shared geekiness, amazing things happen. You see this in academic departments and at conferences where conversations blossom into full-on nerdouts as two or more people realise they have an interest in common, often kicking off with “Hey, do you know if … ?” It happened to me; you wouldn’t be reading this if it hadn’t.

Most technological developments of the last two decades (centuries? millennia?) were created by geeks who didn’t care whether people knew they were smart; who didn’t worry about looking cool, because they were too busy chasing down their idea. Education needs to reclaim that indifference to what’s “cool” and set about showing that growing and following a passion is one of the most rewarding — and genuinely cool — things you can do.

We don’t geek out enough; we certainly don’t let our students see us geeking out enough. Understanding and enjoying focused obsession is far too good a thing to keep all to ourselves.

What’s also interesting is how the diagram lines up with Good to Great. Jim Collins uses what you’re good at (your strengths) and what you’re passionate about (your interests), but then adds what you can make money at…and calls it the hedgehog concept, a method of determining what a business should do. I think the same concepts apply to determining what individuals should do.

Thanks for this — I’d heard of the book but haven’t read it. I hadn’t really thought about the “what you can make money at” aspect, though obviously that’s Geek Nirvana, making money at something you’re good at and interested in! This is, I guess, where the über-geeks I linked to in the previous post have lucked out — they’ve found their niche doing exactly those three things. Fab.